The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier Page A

a boy or a man,” she said. “Your sister raised you up right.” Kip wanted to tell her that Molly didn’t raise him—that he was raised by Ma and Da—but he held his tongue. Theold woman drew a churchwarden pipe from her pack and stuffed it with tobacco from a pouch around her waist. She lit the bowl and began smoking like a man. The smell reminded Kip of autumn leaves. “You know by now that Master Windsor grew up in that house,” she said.
    “He moved away when he was a boy,” Kip said. “They told my sister it was some kind of bad fever that took his whole family—left him an orphan.”
    The woman nodded. “He is an orphan … though I’m not so sure about the rest of your story.” She drew a deep breath and released it. “I remember the night it happened—it’s the sort of night you don’t quickly forget. ’Twas a terrible storm, howlin’ winds, cold rain. Sometime in the wee hours, there’s a wailing sound come down the village road—the kind of scream that sets your every hair on end. Folks rush out of doors to find young Master Windsor—no older than you—in his nightclothes, soaked to the bone, not even shoes on his feet. He’s pale as a ghost and thin, too. We hardly recognize him. He’s frantic with fear and keeps saying something evil’s come for him—come for his parents.”
    Kip suddenly wished very much that he were not having this conversation. He wanted to be at the stables, in the house—anywhere but on the bridge, talking to this old woman. Still, he had to know. “Did they find out what it was?” he said. “The evil thing that was after him?”
    “We may be superstitious around these parts, but we aren’theartless. A few of the men got together rifles and dogs and lanterns and rode out here. The house was wrecked twice over from the storm. Furniture tossed, doors ripped open, windows smashed … and nothing else.”
    Kip swallowed. “What about his ma and da?”
    “Gone.” She pointed the long stem of her pipe at him. “So tell me this: What kind of fever turns a house inside out and makes flesh-and-blood people vanish into thin air?”
    Kip had no answer. He tried not to think of that screaming boy in the stormy road. He tried not to think of what evil might have taken the boy’s family. He looked at the woman and saw she was watching him carefully—probably waiting to see what effect her story had made upon him. “I dinna believe you,” he said sharply. “If any of that stuff had happened to Master Windsor when he was a boy, there’s not a thing in the whole world that would bring him back here.”
    The woman nodded, puffing. “You’d be surprised. Windsors aren’t the first to try and lay claim to these here woods—I’ll wager they won’t be the last.” Her eyes lingered on the house, looming large in the dusky shadows. “There’s somethin’ about this land that draws folks in, even when every bone in their bodies is telling them to run far, far away …” Her voice trailed off, and she was silent for a long while.
    Kip was beginning to wonder whether she had forgotten about him altogether when she turned to him with a wooden smile. “Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to get clear of these parts before the moon’sout.” She stood up and tied her stool to her pack with a bit of loose rope. She jabbed a finger in Kip’s direction. “Maybe don’t tell that sister of yours what I said about Master Windsor. We wouldn’t want to frighten her.”
    “I won’t,” he said. But he crossed his fingers as he said it.
    The old woman curtsied and faced the road to the west—the opposite direction from where she had come. She adjusted her pack. “Always walk in a straight line, I say. Don’t ever turn back.” So saying, she started down the path, humming and jangling as she went.
    Kip watched her disappear around the darkening bend, his hand clenched tight around the button.

hen Molly arrived at her room that night, she found a gift on the bed.